The Awl http://www.theawl.com/ Be Less Stupid Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:40:57 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.2 The Best And Worst Of What I Saw At Sundance http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/the-best-and-worst-of-sundance http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/the-best-and-worst-of-sundance#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:40:57 +0000 Valerie Temple http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/the-best-and-worst-of-sundance This year I went to Sundance, saw 24 films in six days, and whew! somehow lived to tell the tale. I tried my hardest to see everything that sounded intriguing but, with more than a hundred films screening, it was inevitable that I would miss out on some good ones. I’m still upset that I got shut out of Bachelorette, for example.

But I did get to see some fantastic films, which was a nice consolation for my complete failure on the celeb-sighting-at-Sundance front. What I would have given to spot Robert DeNiro in the wintry climes of Park City! Instead, I got cut in line at a nightclub by Emma Roberts and her entourage of five people. Girl, you are not that famous.

Here I've helpfully broken down the movies I saw into nine handy categories to help you decide which movies to see when they play near you, which ones you can skip, and for which ones it will suffice to watch and mock the trailer (Sean Penn in a Robert Smith wig, I'm looking at you).

1. I DIDN'T FULLY UNDERSTAND THIS SO IT MUST BE BRILLIANT

Beasts of the Southern Wild

The most-buzzed about film at Sundance this year, Beasts of the Southern Wild is a remarkable achievement and totally deserving of its Grand Jury Award. This allegorical film about an intrepid six-year-old girl (played by incredible nonactor Quvenzhané Wallis) who lives with her mysteriously ailing father in a remote Delta community known only as “The Bathtub.” As they prepare for the apopcalyptic day when The Bathtub is destroyed by rising waters, the film mixes in folkloric element to create a truly unique work. Many of the films I saw this year skewed mainstream, but this film is a perfect example of why Sundance exists: To showcase important work made with an independent spirit.


2. THESE WERE TERRIBLE
I arrived at the festival with the naïve belief that any film screened at Sundance would at least be watchable. Boy, was I wrong.

Filly Brown

Gina Rodriguez is likable as would-be rapper Filly Brown, but this movie is just too cheesy to take seriously. With more melodramatic subplots than a telenovela, the film relies on stock characters (Drug-addicted Mom in Jail! Sleazy Record Producer! Mean White Lady!) and clichés instead of introducing us to any humans with anything resembling realistic motivations. The clunky dialogue also made for some unintentional laughs (“Why are you so insensitive, homes?”). The movie seems well intentioned, but it just didn’t work. Also, the music isn't any good.

The First Time

Ugh. I could not stop rolling my eyes at the dialogue in this treacly mess about two teenagers who meet, talk and then (spoiler alert!) get together. That’s it. That’s all that happens. Playing out like a boring one-act play, the two leads endlessly jaw on about their problems with the opposite sex but they are far too attractive for any of this to ever make sense. I’ve never, ever met any teens who were so annoyingly wistful as the ones in this movie. It came as no surprise to find out that writer/director Jon Kasdan has a few episodes of "Dawson’s Creek" to his credit because the film takes the hyper-articulate nattering from that show and crams it into an artlessly framed John Hughes imitation. Given that the filmmaker’s dad is director Lawrence Kasdan (Body Heat, The Big Chill) and his brother is TV producer/director Jake Kasdan (Freaks and Geeks, New Girl), I’m thinking nepotism had a hand in getting this turd into Sundance.


3. SURE, FINE
These two movies were solid, well-made films. They just weren’t favorites.

Middle of Nowhere

Tyler Perry should watch this movie before he attempts something like For Colored Girls again. This is how to tell a serious story for the African-American community without embarrassing yourself. Perry instinctually shoots for the lowest common denominator while this story of a loyal wife biding her time as her husband serves out a prison sentence aimed for something much more—and mostly succeeded.

2 Days in New York
Fans of Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris should be excited because this is essentially the same movie, except Chris Rock is now playing the boyfriend instead of Adam Goldberg. Delpy’s brand of quirky humor sometimes works, but the scenes (and there are more than one!) of Chris Rock talking/doing stand-up to a cardboard cutout of Obama are cringe worthy and already dated.


4. IT'S WEIRD IN OTHER COUNTRIES

Wish You Were Here
Four beautiful Australians take a holiday to Cambodia and one doesn’t come back. This one could have been titled The Hangover 3: Shit Gets Real.

Where Do We Go Now?

If you think a musical comedy about Lebanese religious in-fighting sounds like fun, then this movie is for you!

Madrid, 1987
A luscious young student and her gnarly old professor get stuck in a bathroom overnight – naked! What follows is boring, erotic, then boring and erotic. So, this movie is kinda like dating a Women’s Studies major.

Teddy Bear
I loved this weird Danish drama about a 38-year-old bodybuilder who is so dominated by his tiny, scary mother that he lacks any ability to talk to the opposite sex. That is, until he takes a trip to Thailand because love seems easier to find there. Like Wish You Were Here, this film exposes the seedy underbelly of vacationing in a foreign country.


5. GOOD MOVIES ABOUT THIRTYSOMETHINGS

Hello I Must Be Going

Since debuting opposite Kate Winslet in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, Melanie Lynskey has had a tougher time breaking through in Hollywood than her ridiculously famous co-star. She’s a recognizable face but mainly for filling the Joan Cusack, best-friend role in middling movies (Coyote Ugly, Sweet Home Alabama) and being the best part of a crappy television show ("Two and a Half Men"). But that may change once people see her fantastic work as the lead in Hello I Must Be Going, a great film about a 35-year-old woman who is completely directionless after a divorce and has to move in with her parents. She spends her days wandering around the house in the same t-shirt and no pants, sort of like I did the summer after I graduated from college. When she starts an unexpected relationship with a 19 year old, it’s somehow sweet and not creepy. Blythe Danner is just perfect as her mother. Which brings us to the age-old question: How is it that she is so cool and Gwyneth Paltrow is so lame?

Celeste and Jesse Forever
Rashida Jones co-wrote and stars in Celeste and Jesse Forever, another favorite of mine from the festival. The story about a divorcing couple who want to stay best friends even as they pursue other people made me think about every breakup I’ve ever had, but in a good way. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, it's a sharply written movie that shows off Jones' comedic range. Also, it's nice to see Andy Samberg actually act.

Smashed

Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Aaron Paul are a young, married couple who love being drunk because it’s so much fun. But after a series of embarrassing and scary drunk escapades, Winstead decides to sober up, which puts a strain on the relationship. The film is refreshingly accessible, especially when compared to other films in the addiction canon, such as the bleak Leaving Las Vegas or preachy 28 Days. This is a couple you know and story that might hit close to home. Oh, and Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman have small roles, so that’s cool.

Keep the Lights On
Documentary filmmaker Erik and closeted lawyer Paul meet-cute through a casual encounter phone line (it was 1998, folks!) and what follows is an intensely personal, super-honest film that chronicles the dizzying high-highs and depressing low-lows of a decade-long relationship, one additionally complicated by crack addiction. I wish I could have seen the entire film but I left early in order to catch a screening of The Comedy. As you’ll read below, that was an err in judgement.


6. FUCK YOU, HIPSTERS
No seriously, fuck you. I didn’t see I Am Not A Hipster (because the title alone makes my skin crawl) but I got my fill of stylish disaffection with these two bile-inducing films.

The Comedy

Tim Heidecker’s fat, aging hipster is possibly the most hateful character ever committed to celluloid. He’s an entitled prick who doesn’t take anything seriously and acts like a giant asshole to everyone except his friends, who are also doughy, unshaven jerks. Instead of a plot there are loose, unconnected scenes that feel more like sketch ideas (“Tim Bullies a Cab Driver Into Letting Him Drive,” “Tim Talks to Some Black People,” “Tim and Friends Go to a Catholic Church and Mess Around with the Holy Water and Climb on the Pews,” etc. etc.), all of which contain at least one good joke but then drag on for excruciating lengths of time. It was a brutal viewing experience, and a lot of people couldn’t take it. At least a third of the audience walked out of my screening—the most walk-outs I saw during the entire festival. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it's probably destined to be one of those films that everyone will see just to talk about it. (Greenberg, anyone?)

Nobody Walks

Apparently, nobody is walking in this film because they're all too busy fucking Olivia Thirlby. She comes to town, sporting that disfiguring haircut that every beautiful girl seems to get post-college, and tries to work on the sound design for her art film about bugs (oh brother!), but can’t get any work done because every guy she encounters wants to do her and she always goes for it because what are consequences? There’s even a vaguely unsettling nighttime scene where a six-year-old boy in a sleep t-shirt takes her by the hand and makes her walk him back to his bedroom. It’s like he wants to fuck her too and he doesn’t even know what fucking is yet. I wanted to like this film—mostly because I feel bad that John Krasinski has never been in a good movie—but, save for the stunning cinematography, I hated everything from the characters names (Kolt and Martine being the worst offenders) to the film’s subtly offensive attitude about women and sex. Lena Dunham co-wrote the screenplay but she left out the heart and humor that I enjoyed in Tiny Furniture.


7. THE DOCUMENTARIES WERE ALL PRETTY DECENT

Searching for Sugar Man

After releasing two do-nothing albums in the U.S. in the 1970s, enigmatic singer-songwriter Rodriguez went on to become bigger than Elvis in South Africa. This musical detective story about the search for the mysterious musician is fascinating, but mostly what I enjoyed about this worthy doc is Rodriguez's amazing music. If you're not familiar with it, think of a pleasing blend of Bob Dylan and Smokey Robinson—do yourself a favor and download his songs “Sugar Man” and “I Wonder” right now.

West of Memphis
Although I haven’t seen any of the Paradise Lost movies, this look at the West Memphis 3’s fight for freedom, produced by husband-and-wife team Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, seems comprehensive and zips along, despite it’s bulky two-hour-plus length. However, WM3-er Damien Echols and his wife Lorri Davis were also producers, so don’t expect a completely unbiased account. But Amy Berg’s adroit direction makes great use of the many interviews they scored with key players in the case. I just wish I didn’t have to see so much of Eddie Vedder.

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

This beautifully shot documentary offers a thorough history of the famous performance artist, as well as a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at her recent retrospective and much talked about new piece at MOMA last spring. I wish the filmmakers would have opted against including the scene where James Franco sat for the artist, but it was gratifying when an oblivious spectator asked him, “So, are you an actor?” Tiny victories.

Finding North
This Tom Colicchio-produced documentary about hunger in America is sort of like reading a well-researched New York Times article while listening to the music of The Civil Wars. So, like a lazy Sunday afternoon that is sometimes interrupted by Jeff Bridges urging you to do something. I’m downplaying the seriousness of this issue but I’m also a little fatigued with “issue” docs of the Waiting for Superman and Food, Inc. variety—the kind that are competent yet too slick to really make an impression.


8. REMEMBER THAT CUTE BOY FROM SNOW DAY?!
Move over Michael Cera, there’s a new non-threatening boy in town! With three movies at Sundance this year, it looks like Snow Day's Mark Webber will be playing the guy you root for in every movie you want to see next year.

Save the Date

Lizzy Caplan plays a commitment-phobe artist (her drawings in the movie were done by Jeffrey Brown) who hooks up with Mark Webber immediately after dumping Geoffrey Arend (y’know, that lucky guy who married Christina Hendricks). Alison Brie of "Community" plays her sister, who tries to be supportive but is distracted by her upcoming wedding to Martin Starr. Since I adore everyone in this cast, it’s almost guaranteed that I would like this movie. But I must admit that Lizzy Caplan’s near-constant mugging and silly-talk did eventually wear thin.

For a Good Time, Call…
Perpetual scene-stealer Ari Gaynor (remember her from when she was hilarious in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist?) finally gets a lead role in this playfully raunchy film about two former enemies, now roommates, who start a phone-sex operation out of their NYC apartment. Lauren Miller, who co-wrote the film and co-owns Seth Rogen’s dong IRL, is fine as the prissy girl who (literally) finds her voice in phone sex, but it's Gaynor’s big, brassy performance that makes this lady-centric flick a real must-see. Mark Webber and his scruff play Gaynor’s love interest, a dude she met during an, ahem, business call. Aww!

The End of Love
This Mark Webber fellow has quite the work ethic. In addition to Save the Date and For a Good Time, Call…, he also wrote, directed and starred in The End of Love, one of my favorite movies at Sundance this year. It's a poignant, semi-autobiographical drama about an aspiring actor living in Hollywood and grappling with single fatherhood, and Webber has added a dose of realism to it by casting his own infant son as his co-star. The two year old’s performance is revelatory (no joke) and unlike any I have ever seen before, probably because he’s not really acting. The way the camera captures these secret moments between a father and son is truly affecting.


9. ROCK STARS ARE DEPRESSING

This Must Be The Place

Predictably, a movie in which Sean Penn hunts for Nazis while wearing Robert Smith drag is a big old mess. Penn’s falsetto performance quickly becomes grating and nothing quite gels in this quirk-filled collection of missteps.

For Ellen
Paul Dano’s aspiring rock star is of the unpopular variety, all silver rings and heavy metal posturing. While initially interesting, Dano’s character is given a thinly developed story about his feeble attempts to get to know his young daughter before he loses parental rights once his divorce is finalized. What follows is a litany of long takes where nothing much happens, including an excruciating scene where the below-average child actor very slowly picks out a new toy at a store. Trust me, it’s boring.



Valerie Temple, former Cooking the Books auteur, programs the movies at an arthouse movie theater in PA. She also dabbles in comedy and likes to dress up like Paula Poundstone in her free time. She's on Twitter!

---

See more posts by Valerie Temple

10 comments

]]> This year I went to Sundance, saw 24 films in six days, and whew! somehow lived to tell the tale. I tried my hardest to see everything that sounded intriguing but, with more than a hundred films screening, it was inevitable that I would miss out on some good ones. I’m still upset that I got shut out of Bachelorette, for example.

But I did get to see some fantastic films, which was a nice consolation for my complete failure on the celeb-sighting-at-Sundance front. What I would have given to spot Robert DeNiro in the wintry climes of Park City! Instead, I got cut in line at a nightclub by Emma Roberts and her entourage of five people. Girl, you are not that famous.

Here I've helpfully broken down the movies I saw into nine handy categories to help you decide which movies to see when they play near you, which ones you can skip, and for which ones it will suffice to watch and mock the trailer (Sean Penn in a Robert Smith wig, I'm looking at you).

1. I DIDN'T FULLY UNDERSTAND THIS SO IT MUST BE BRILLIANT

Beasts of the Southern Wild

The most-buzzed about film at Sundance this year, Beasts of the Southern Wild is a remarkable achievement and totally deserving of its Grand Jury Award. This allegorical film about an intrepid six-year-old girl (played by incredible nonactor Quvenzhané Wallis) who lives with her mysteriously ailing father in a remote Delta community known only as “The Bathtub.” As they prepare for the apopcalyptic day when The Bathtub is destroyed by rising waters, the film mixes in folkloric element to create a truly unique work. Many of the films I saw this year skewed mainstream, but this film is a perfect example of why Sundance exists: To showcase important work made with an independent spirit.


2. THESE WERE TERRIBLE
I arrived at the festival with the naïve belief that any film screened at Sundance would at least be watchable. Boy, was I wrong.

Filly Brown

Gina Rodriguez is likable as would-be rapper Filly Brown, but this movie is just too cheesy to take seriously. With more melodramatic subplots than a telenovela, the film relies on stock characters (Drug-addicted Mom in Jail! Sleazy Record Producer! Mean White Lady!) and clichés instead of introducing us to any humans with anything resembling realistic motivations. The clunky dialogue also made for some unintentional laughs (“Why are you so insensitive, homes?”). The movie seems well intentioned, but it just didn’t work. Also, the music isn't any good.

The First Time

Ugh. I could not stop rolling my eyes at the dialogue in this treacly mess about two teenagers who meet, talk and then (spoiler alert!) get together. That’s it. That’s all that happens. Playing out like a boring one-act play, the two leads endlessly jaw on about their problems with the opposite sex but they are far too attractive for any of this to ever make sense. I’ve never, ever met any teens who were so annoyingly wistful as the ones in this movie. It came as no surprise to find out that writer/director Jon Kasdan has a few episodes of "Dawson’s Creek" to his credit because the film takes the hyper-articulate nattering from that show and crams it into an artlessly framed John Hughes imitation. Given that the filmmaker’s dad is director Lawrence Kasdan (Body Heat, The Big Chill) and his brother is TV producer/director Jake Kasdan (Freaks and Geeks, New Girl), I’m thinking nepotism had a hand in getting this turd into Sundance.


3. SURE, FINE
These two movies were solid, well-made films. They just weren’t favorites.

Middle of Nowhere

Tyler Perry should watch this movie before he attempts something like For Colored Girls again. This is how to tell a serious story for the African-American community without embarrassing yourself. Perry instinctually shoots for the lowest common denominator while this story of a loyal wife biding her time as her husband serves out a prison sentence aimed for something much more—and mostly succeeded.

2 Days in New York
Fans of Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris should be excited because this is essentially the same movie, except Chris Rock is now playing the boyfriend instead of Adam Goldberg. Delpy’s brand of quirky humor sometimes works, but the scenes (and there are more than one!) of Chris Rock talking/doing stand-up to a cardboard cutout of Obama are cringe worthy and already dated.


4. IT'S WEIRD IN OTHER COUNTRIES

Wish You Were Here
Four beautiful Australians take a holiday to Cambodia and one doesn’t come back. This one could have been titled The Hangover 3: Shit Gets Real.

Where Do We Go Now?

If you think a musical comedy about Lebanese religious in-fighting sounds like fun, then this movie is for you!

Madrid, 1987
A luscious young student and her gnarly old professor get stuck in a bathroom overnight – naked! What follows is boring, erotic, then boring and erotic. So, this movie is kinda like dating a Women’s Studies major.

Teddy Bear
I loved this weird Danish drama about a 38-year-old bodybuilder who is so dominated by his tiny, scary mother that he lacks any ability to talk to the opposite sex. That is, until he takes a trip to Thailand because love seems easier to find there. Like Wish You Were Here, this film exposes the seedy underbelly of vacationing in a foreign country.


5. GOOD MOVIES ABOUT THIRTYSOMETHINGS

Hello I Must Be Going

Since debuting opposite Kate Winslet in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, Melanie Lynskey has had a tougher time breaking through in Hollywood than her ridiculously famous co-star. She’s a recognizable face but mainly for filling the Joan Cusack, best-friend role in middling movies (Coyote Ugly, Sweet Home Alabama) and being the best part of a crappy television show ("Two and a Half Men"). But that may change once people see her fantastic work as the lead in Hello I Must Be Going, a great film about a 35-year-old woman who is completely directionless after a divorce and has to move in with her parents. She spends her days wandering around the house in the same t-shirt and no pants, sort of like I did the summer after I graduated from college. When she starts an unexpected relationship with a 19 year old, it’s somehow sweet and not creepy. Blythe Danner is just perfect as her mother. Which brings us to the age-old question: How is it that she is so cool and Gwyneth Paltrow is so lame?

Celeste and Jesse Forever
Rashida Jones co-wrote and stars in Celeste and Jesse Forever, another favorite of mine from the festival. The story about a divorcing couple who want to stay best friends even as they pursue other people made me think about every breakup I’ve ever had, but in a good way. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, it's a sharply written movie that shows off Jones' comedic range. Also, it's nice to see Andy Samberg actually act.

Smashed

Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Aaron Paul are a young, married couple who love being drunk because it’s so much fun. But after a series of embarrassing and scary drunk escapades, Winstead decides to sober up, which puts a strain on the relationship. The film is refreshingly accessible, especially when compared to other films in the addiction canon, such as the bleak Leaving Las Vegas or preachy 28 Days. This is a couple you know and story that might hit close to home. Oh, and Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman have small roles, so that’s cool.

Keep the Lights On
Documentary filmmaker Erik and closeted lawyer Paul meet-cute through a casual encounter phone line (it was 1998, folks!) and what follows is an intensely personal, super-honest film that chronicles the dizzying high-highs and depressing low-lows of a decade-long relationship, one additionally complicated by crack addiction. I wish I could have seen the entire film but I left early in order to catch a screening of The Comedy. As you’ll read below, that was an err in judgement.


6. FUCK YOU, HIPSTERS
No seriously, fuck you. I didn’t see I Am Not A Hipster (because the title alone makes my skin crawl) but I got my fill of stylish disaffection with these two bile-inducing films.

The Comedy

Tim Heidecker’s fat, aging hipster is possibly the most hateful character ever committed to celluloid. He’s an entitled prick who doesn’t take anything seriously and acts like a giant asshole to everyone except his friends, who are also doughy, unshaven jerks. Instead of a plot there are loose, unconnected scenes that feel more like sketch ideas (“Tim Bullies a Cab Driver Into Letting Him Drive,” “Tim Talks to Some Black People,” “Tim and Friends Go to a Catholic Church and Mess Around with the Holy Water and Climb on the Pews,” etc. etc.), all of which contain at least one good joke but then drag on for excruciating lengths of time. It was a brutal viewing experience, and a lot of people couldn’t take it. At least a third of the audience walked out of my screening—the most walk-outs I saw during the entire festival. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it's probably destined to be one of those films that everyone will see just to talk about it. (Greenberg, anyone?)

Nobody Walks

Apparently, nobody is walking in this film because they're all too busy fucking Olivia Thirlby. She comes to town, sporting that disfiguring haircut that every beautiful girl seems to get post-college, and tries to work on the sound design for her art film about bugs (oh brother!), but can’t get any work done because every guy she encounters wants to do her and she always goes for it because what are consequences? There’s even a vaguely unsettling nighttime scene where a six-year-old boy in a sleep t-shirt takes her by the hand and makes her walk him back to his bedroom. It’s like he wants to fuck her too and he doesn’t even know what fucking is yet. I wanted to like this film—mostly because I feel bad that John Krasinski has never been in a good movie—but, save for the stunning cinematography, I hated everything from the characters names (Kolt and Martine being the worst offenders) to the film’s subtly offensive attitude about women and sex. Lena Dunham co-wrote the screenplay but she left out the heart and humor that I enjoyed in Tiny Furniture.


7. THE DOCUMENTARIES WERE ALL PRETTY DECENT

Searching for Sugar Man

After releasing two do-nothing albums in the U.S. in the 1970s, enigmatic singer-songwriter Rodriguez went on to become bigger than Elvis in South Africa. This musical detective story about the search for the mysterious musician is fascinating, but mostly what I enjoyed about this worthy doc is Rodriguez's amazing music. If you're not familiar with it, think of a pleasing blend of Bob Dylan and Smokey Robinson—do yourself a favor and download his songs “Sugar Man” and “I Wonder” right now.

West of Memphis
Although I haven’t seen any of the Paradise Lost movies, this look at the West Memphis 3’s fight for freedom, produced by husband-and-wife team Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, seems comprehensive and zips along, despite it’s bulky two-hour-plus length. However, WM3-er Damien Echols and his wife Lorri Davis were also producers, so don’t expect a completely unbiased account. But Amy Berg’s adroit direction makes great use of the many interviews they scored with key players in the case. I just wish I didn’t have to see so much of Eddie Vedder.

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

This beautifully shot documentary offers a thorough history of the famous performance artist, as well as a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at her recent retrospective and much talked about new piece at MOMA last spring. I wish the filmmakers would have opted against including the scene where James Franco sat for the artist, but it was gratifying when an oblivious spectator asked him, “So, are you an actor?” Tiny victories.

Finding North
This Tom Colicchio-produced documentary about hunger in America is sort of like reading a well-researched New York Times article while listening to the music of The Civil Wars. So, like a lazy Sunday afternoon that is sometimes interrupted by Jeff Bridges urging you to do something. I’m downplaying the seriousness of this issue but I’m also a little fatigued with “issue” docs of the Waiting for Superman and Food, Inc. variety—the kind that are competent yet too slick to really make an impression.


8. REMEMBER THAT CUTE BOY FROM SNOW DAY?!
Move over Michael Cera, there’s a new non-threatening boy in town! With three movies at Sundance this year, it looks like Snow Day's Mark Webber will be playing the guy you root for in every movie you want to see next year.

Save the Date

Lizzy Caplan plays a commitment-phobe artist (her drawings in the movie were done by Jeffrey Brown) who hooks up with Mark Webber immediately after dumping Geoffrey Arend (y’know, that lucky guy who married Christina Hendricks). Alison Brie of "Community" plays her sister, who tries to be supportive but is distracted by her upcoming wedding to Martin Starr. Since I adore everyone in this cast, it’s almost guaranteed that I would like this movie. But I must admit that Lizzy Caplan’s near-constant mugging and silly-talk did eventually wear thin.

For a Good Time, Call…
Perpetual scene-stealer Ari Gaynor (remember her from when she was hilarious in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist?) finally gets a lead role in this playfully raunchy film about two former enemies, now roommates, who start a phone-sex operation out of their NYC apartment. Lauren Miller, who co-wrote the film and co-owns Seth Rogen’s dong IRL, is fine as the prissy girl who (literally) finds her voice in phone sex, but it's Gaynor’s big, brassy performance that makes this lady-centric flick a real must-see. Mark Webber and his scruff play Gaynor’s love interest, a dude she met during an, ahem, business call. Aww!

The End of Love
This Mark Webber fellow has quite the work ethic. In addition to Save the Date and For a Good Time, Call…, he also wrote, directed and starred in The End of Love, one of my favorite movies at Sundance this year. It's a poignant, semi-autobiographical drama about an aspiring actor living in Hollywood and grappling with single fatherhood, and Webber has added a dose of realism to it by casting his own infant son as his co-star. The two year old’s performance is revelatory (no joke) and unlike any I have ever seen before, probably because he’s not really acting. The way the camera captures these secret moments between a father and son is truly affecting.


9. ROCK STARS ARE DEPRESSING

This Must Be The Place

Predictably, a movie in which Sean Penn hunts for Nazis while wearing Robert Smith drag is a big old mess. Penn’s falsetto performance quickly becomes grating and nothing quite gels in this quirk-filled collection of missteps.

For Ellen
Paul Dano’s aspiring rock star is of the unpopular variety, all silver rings and heavy metal posturing. While initially interesting, Dano’s character is given a thinly developed story about his feeble attempts to get to know his young daughter before he loses parental rights once his divorce is finalized. What follows is a litany of long takes where nothing much happens, including an excruciating scene where the below-average child actor very slowly picks out a new toy at a store. Trust me, it’s boring.



Valerie Temple, former Cooking the Books auteur, programs the movies at an arthouse movie theater in PA. She also dabbles in comedy and likes to dress up like Paula Poundstone in her free time. She's on Twitter!

---

See more posts by Valerie Temple

10 comments

]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/the-best-and-worst-of-sundance/feed 10 "The Woman in Black": Everything Old Is Good Again http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/the-woman-in-black-everything-old-is-good-again http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/the-woman-in-black-everything-old-is-good-again#comments Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:10:39 +0000 Melissa Lafsky http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/the-woman-in-black-everything-old-is-good-again Horror movies are beset with misconceptions, the greatest being: "How can you watch those things!? They're all fatuous violence and gratuitous boobs!" Which is kindof like saying, "How can you read those feminist blogs?! They're all alluvial deposits of man-hating penis envy!"

The truth is that the horror canon, like any other film group, contains a vast spectrum of work ranging from smack-somebody awfulness to transcendence. The only thread holding it all together is that every horror film DEMANDS something of you—that you abandon the safe, bucolic cognition of your daily reality and confront the darker aspects of being alive. Some movies do this by plopping a likable protagonist in a haunted-to-the-gills mansion. Others do it through crotch-stabbing intestine-smearing celebrations of mayhem. The Woman in Black (opening today!) is of the former ilk, and it's a reason in itself to drop the Judgment McJudgeypants routine and take your ass to see a horror movie.

Part of WiB's greatness lies in its restorative role: It marks the real resurrection of Hammer Film productions. (Hammer also produced Let Me In.) If you're not familiar with Hammer, here are two words to jog your memory: Vincent Price Christopher Lee.

From the 1950s to the mid-'60s, one film company dominated the horror market, churning out megahits like The Curse of Frankenstein and The Brides of Dracula. (Snicker you may, but these were the popularity equivalent of Iron Man II.) With nary a chainsaw in sight, Hammer films celebrated the broody glamour of Victorian abstruseness, packing every shot with heaving bosoms and British countrysides. They made household names of thespian giants like Christopher Lee (one of the great Draculas of all time), Peter Cushing (Victor Frankenstein, aka the best thing in Star Wars), and of course, His Royal Price (if you don't know his work, there's no hope for you. Just kidding—get thee to Wikipedia!). Hammer films were the antithesis of slashers—Hammer honed its focus to monstrous aristocrats who terrorized innocent farm lasses in the night. Grand orchestral scores accompanied kidnappings of virgins, townsfolk bearing pitchforks and the occasional burning at the stake. While the nukes proliferated around them, moviegoers were entranced with the mystery and casual brutality of the pre-industrial world.

Then came the hyperrealism of the '70s, and things got all Last House on the Left. Horror abandoned its sense of wonder in favor of grisly torture scenes set to Moog synthesizers. Forget the mummies or doleful Dracula—we found the true monster, and it was us.

Cut to modern day, where Hammer has staged a grand return just as our taste for realism is reaching its saturation point. (Right? I mean come on, you can watch every sick and twisted vagary of humanity on your smartphone while eating a bagel, so do we really need more movies full of hapless teens injected with hydrofluoric acid?) And what better cultural trademark to usher in the new era than Harry Potter himself? Daniel Radcliffe was made for oldfangled ghost movies—his expression of clenched stoicism must be a near-reflex after 10 years of Voldemort's BS.

With Radcliffe at the fore, Hammer reclaims its place in pop culture with no explanations, as if 40 years of fevered tech-transmutation hadn't happened. Here we are, right back in the Victorian small town, where life is segmented by stone walls, hedge rows and gloppy English bogs ( Saw? What Saw?). The movie does this setting perfectly—every chamberwick and copper pot is perfectly placed and weighted. Even the wood panels lining a train car evoke an emotional response. Radcliffe's character, a grieving solicitor struggling to support his son after the wife dies in childbirth (another fun Victorian fear) finds himself in precisely the sort of situation one would encounter before solar-powered GPS systems and turbo engines and Gchat: He must travel to a remote village to settle the estate of a now-deceased widow. Her house, natch, is a repository of undead angst located smack in the middle of a fog-infested moor. Kudos to the prop designer for assembling this gothic paradise, where even the sconces ooze creepiness. One plot point revolves around the single scariest collection of toys since Poltergeist—it's a virtual madness menagerie (which presents the question, how was every nineteenth-century child not frightened into a coma by age 4?).

Radcliffe and his spectral companions usher us, the tech-saturated seen-it-all generation, back to this perfect era just before communication and transportation blew up and spoiled all the ghostly fun. WIB proves a valuable point: that modern moviegoers can be entertained by a man, his mutton chops, and a fantastically spooky house. The film contains no huge surprises, and there aren't SUPPOSED to be any—you know when Radcliffe looks in the window and the director cuts to an external shot of his face that a ghost will pop out behind him. But it's STILL SCARY ANYWAY. For the simple reason that we are human beings, and we possess a nervous system that responds in predictable ways to an established set of stimuli. If you prime us with 20 minutes of ominous music and creepy imagery and then slap a ghost in our faces, WE WILL BE SCARED, whether we like/admit/Tweet it or not. We can still participate in that delicious shared experience of humanity, iPhones be damned.

Granted, none of this would work quite so well if we weren't already enraptured by all things Victorian. When our new cultural obsession is a PBS series in which liveried butlers iron the morning newspaper, you know we're in nostalgia territory. Which, in my view, is a lovely thing. Perhaps we're tiring of our information being delivered on an instantaneous basis. Perhaps we're sensing there's a wonder being lost in always having answers at our fingertips. Perhaps we can't learn EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS from RSS feeds. Maybe we still want to MARVEL AT SOMETHING. Even if it is a beleaguered Harry Potter with mutton chops.

This film gets four bloody chainsaws (out of five)—or if you'd rather, four drippy candelabras. Vive le Victorian!



Melissa Lafsky is pleased to have been scared by your movie.

---

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13 comments

]]> Horror movies are beset with misconceptions, the greatest being: "How can you watch those things!? They're all fatuous violence and gratuitous boobs!" Which is kindof like saying, "How can you read those feminist blogs?! They're all alluvial deposits of man-hating penis envy!"

The truth is that the horror canon, like any other film group, contains a vast spectrum of work ranging from smack-somebody awfulness to transcendence. The only thread holding it all together is that every horror film DEMANDS something of you—that you abandon the safe, bucolic cognition of your daily reality and confront the darker aspects of being alive. Some movies do this by plopping a likable protagonist in a haunted-to-the-gills mansion. Others do it through crotch-stabbing intestine-smearing celebrations of mayhem. The Woman in Black (opening today!) is of the former ilk, and it's a reason in itself to drop the Judgment McJudgeypants routine and take your ass to see a horror movie.

Part of WiB's greatness lies in its restorative role: It marks the real resurrection of Hammer Film productions. (Hammer also produced Let Me In.) If you're not familiar with Hammer, here are two words to jog your memory: Vincent Price Christopher Lee.

From the 1950s to the mid-'60s, one film company dominated the horror market, churning out megahits like The Curse of Frankenstein and The Brides of Dracula. (Snicker you may, but these were the popularity equivalent of Iron Man II.) With nary a chainsaw in sight, Hammer films celebrated the broody glamour of Victorian abstruseness, packing every shot with heaving bosoms and British countrysides. They made household names of thespian giants like Christopher Lee (one of the great Draculas of all time), Peter Cushing (Victor Frankenstein, aka the best thing in Star Wars), and of course, His Royal Price (if you don't know his work, there's no hope for you. Just kidding—get thee to Wikipedia!). Hammer films were the antithesis of slashers—Hammer honed its focus to monstrous aristocrats who terrorized innocent farm lasses in the night. Grand orchestral scores accompanied kidnappings of virgins, townsfolk bearing pitchforks and the occasional burning at the stake. While the nukes proliferated around them, moviegoers were entranced with the mystery and casual brutality of the pre-industrial world.

Then came the hyperrealism of the '70s, and things got all Last House on the Left. Horror abandoned its sense of wonder in favor of grisly torture scenes set to Moog synthesizers. Forget the mummies or doleful Dracula—we found the true monster, and it was us.

Cut to modern day, where Hammer has staged a grand return just as our taste for realism is reaching its saturation point. (Right? I mean come on, you can watch every sick and twisted vagary of humanity on your smartphone while eating a bagel, so do we really need more movies full of hapless teens injected with hydrofluoric acid?) And what better cultural trademark to usher in the new era than Harry Potter himself? Daniel Radcliffe was made for oldfangled ghost movies—his expression of clenched stoicism must be a near-reflex after 10 years of Voldemort's BS.

With Radcliffe at the fore, Hammer reclaims its place in pop culture with no explanations, as if 40 years of fevered tech-transmutation hadn't happened. Here we are, right back in the Victorian small town, where life is segmented by stone walls, hedge rows and gloppy English bogs ( Saw? What Saw?). The movie does this setting perfectly—every chamberwick and copper pot is perfectly placed and weighted. Even the wood panels lining a train car evoke an emotional response. Radcliffe's character, a grieving solicitor struggling to support his son after the wife dies in childbirth (another fun Victorian fear) finds himself in precisely the sort of situation one would encounter before solar-powered GPS systems and turbo engines and Gchat: He must travel to a remote village to settle the estate of a now-deceased widow. Her house, natch, is a repository of undead angst located smack in the middle of a fog-infested moor. Kudos to the prop designer for assembling this gothic paradise, where even the sconces ooze creepiness. One plot point revolves around the single scariest collection of toys since Poltergeist—it's a virtual madness menagerie (which presents the question, how was every nineteenth-century child not frightened into a coma by age 4?).

Radcliffe and his spectral companions usher us, the tech-saturated seen-it-all generation, back to this perfect era just before communication and transportation blew up and spoiled all the ghostly fun. WIB proves a valuable point: that modern moviegoers can be entertained by a man, his mutton chops, and a fantastically spooky house. The film contains no huge surprises, and there aren't SUPPOSED to be any—you know when Radcliffe looks in the window and the director cuts to an external shot of his face that a ghost will pop out behind him. But it's STILL SCARY ANYWAY. For the simple reason that we are human beings, and we possess a nervous system that responds in predictable ways to an established set of stimuli. If you prime us with 20 minutes of ominous music and creepy imagery and then slap a ghost in our faces, WE WILL BE SCARED, whether we like/admit/Tweet it or not. We can still participate in that delicious shared experience of humanity, iPhones be damned.

Granted, none of this would work quite so well if we weren't already enraptured by all things Victorian. When our new cultural obsession is a PBS series in which liveried butlers iron the morning newspaper, you know we're in nostalgia territory. Which, in my view, is a lovely thing. Perhaps we're tiring of our information being delivered on an instantaneous basis. Perhaps we're sensing there's a wonder being lost in always having answers at our fingertips. Perhaps we can't learn EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS from RSS feeds. Maybe we still want to MARVEL AT SOMETHING. Even if it is a beleaguered Harry Potter with mutton chops.

This film gets four bloody chainsaws (out of five)—or if you'd rather, four drippy candelabras. Vive le Victorian!



Melissa Lafsky is pleased to have been scared by your movie.

---

See more posts by Melissa Lafsky

13 comments

]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/the-woman-in-black-everything-old-is-good-again/feed 13 What Movies Make You Ignore Everything Else? http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/most-watched-movies http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/most-watched-movies#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:00:09 +0000 Nadia Chaudhury http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/most-watched-movies It's been well documented that TV is a time-suck. One reason: the repeat showings of movies, some of which, even if you've already seen them a hundred times (and you might even own on DVD), you will stick with for the duration, through commercials, bad cable edits and all. (Speaking of cable edits, was I the only one who didn’t know about that pubic hair on the pizza scene in She’s All That?!?) We asked an assortment of folks which movies never fail to suck them in.

Kurt Andersen

Pretty much the only time I mindlessly flip TV channels these days is when I'm traveling alone and staying in a hotel, or my wife's out of town. I guess probably Badlands, because it's one of my favorite movies and the real-life story on which it's based (young couple on a murder spree in Nebraska, where I grew up) is my earliest memory, from when I was 3. And almost any Bill Murray movie.

Kate Aurthur

I realized that there are two things that stop me dead in my tracks when I notice they're on:

Jaws 2: I lived in East Hampton full-time until I was 10, so the Jaws phenomenon affected me profoundly. (I told adults I wanted to be an ichthyologist specializing in sharks.) I wasn't allowed to see the first one in the theater until its re-release the following summer—and I still don't know why my parents allowed that—but by the time Jaws 2 rolled around in 1978, I went immediately. I argued passionately to my parents that it was better than Jaws. They laughed in my face. Now I see that it is terrible, but man, I cannot stop watching it whenever it's on.

Jaws 3: I was nearing 14 in 1983 when Jaws 3 came out. And this I knew was horrific upon first viewing. The 3D is so, so bad. And yet, there are things I love about it, like the horrendous miscasting of Bess Armstrong as the grown-up Mike Brody's (Dennis Quaid) girlfriend. God, I love it! I wish it were on right now. It's awful.

Katie Baker

Legends of the Fall: I've bailed on plans with friends multiple times when I've caught a glimpse of Samuel and Susannah playing tennis on that grass court and known I was now in(side) for the long haul. The only time I don't stop is if I've gotten there AFTER Colonel Ludlow's legendary chalkboard-swinging "AARGGSSCRRWWWUUJMM" scene, because if you've missed that one then what's the point?

A League of Their Own: Someday I am going to produce a 10,000-word chapbook on why this is one of the (if not THE) greatest sports movies ever. And it's worth watching all the way ‘til the end because the old lady casting is so completely sublime. I'd actually love to see someone do a side-by-side of each actress in, say, 15 years with her League of Their Own flash-forward counterpart. I feel like Madonna may have actually appeared in both roles.

Armageddon: And it doesn't matter if I watch all 151 minutes or just the last ten, you can bet I will be choking back tears. (Also, I just went to IMDB to look up how many minutes the movie is—don't worry, I'm not THAT much of a freak—and saw that it's playing this [past] Saturday on FX. Setting my DVR now!)

Alex Balk

I always hope to hit Goodfellas closer to the end than the beginning, because I had plans for those next three hours, but regardless of where I come in I'm stuck for the duration. And every time I land on Silence of the Lambs, I tell myself that I'll turn it off after the "Goldberg Variations" scene where the face-eating happens, but I always get sucked in until the end.

Allison Benedikt

I have been known to stop and sob throughout Father of the Bride (the Steve Martin one, YEP), can easily get pulled into two out of the three Bourne movies, The Upside of Anger (when it used to be on a lot), Gattaca, Funny People (if I catch it in its first two-thirds, before Adam Sandler and Leslie Mann do it), and, lately, that great Ethan Hawke-Philip Seymour Hoffman dysfunctional family thriller Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. But these are the three I've probably watched the most in the past few years:

Groundhog Day: Because it's always good to be reminded that Bill Murray used to be actual funny, not Wes Anderson-funny, and actually moving, not Sofia Coppola-moving. And a great physical comedian. Also: weather humor, Andie MacDowell's only good role.

The Heartbreak Kid: The Farrelly Brothers one. Starring Ben Stiller. It is such a bad movie I can't defend myself but I have watched this thing maybe ten times? Sorry.

Role Models: A great David Wain comedy. Perfect Jane Lynch role. And an essential exhibit in the Case for Why Seann William Scott Should Be a Star. (see: The Dukes of Hazzard, Southland Tales) Pro tip: Whenever Ken Jeong is on screen, go scoop your ice cream.

Sarah Blackwood

Titanic, even if stretched to three or four hours on network television. The dresses! The cross-class romance! Billy Zane's wig! Billy Zane's maniacal exasperation ("I put the coat on her!")! Just… Billy Zane. On a more personal note, this movie came along at exactly the right time in my life, saving me from Godard and insufferability. Popcorn is delicious, it whispered, and I ate it right up.

Speaking of popcorn, you know that part in Dirty Dancing, when Johnny Castle sexily plucks his air guitar, and then shows off some ideas to Neil for a new last dance—a cross between Cuban rhythms and soul—only to be snootily instructed that the last dance will in fact be a pachanga (can you imagine? A pachanga?!), and then also how when you pause the television just so, when Johnny is getting out of bed with Baby, you can maybe, just maybe, see something you aren't supposed to see? Yeah. So maybe I've been watching this movie nonstop since I was twelve years old.

And finally: Go. I can't believe that I have already lived through an entire subculture that has since disappeared. I mean, I wasn't super rave-y, but I did wear a few pairs of ill-advised big jeans. Thank God I never got around to buying one of those teddy-bear backpacks. This movie rules, though, the film that launched a thousand Olyphanatics.

Maria Bustillos

Vincent Price's voice induces satori, so I will watch/listen to any movie in which he appears to the end, no matter when I came in.

Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle is the Ur-text of my personal ethics, a touchstone that repays close and frequent study. It teaches grace under pressure, tolerance, a philosophical submission to the cruel twists of fate and most of all, it shows us how to balance the demands of an independent mind with the responsibilities of brotherhood.

Any animation produced by the Fleischer brothers will also find me rooted to the spot for the duration.

Bobby Finger

Overboard: Kurt and Goldie have been together for nearly 30 years, and their real-life relationship is one of only two things that makes me believe true love is possible. The second thing is that Randy Newman song used during Overboard's end credits.

My Cousin Vinny: Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei) is one of my favorite movie characters, and denying myself the opportunity to hear her say, "I'm an out-of-work hairdresser" during that final courtroom scene is practically self-harm.

Emma Garman

My picks are basically identical: early eighties L.A. noirs involving murders, heroes getting framed for murders, cruelly thwarted love and bonkers suntans. Against All Odds, with Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward, makes me nostalgic for the distant days when romantic leads had chemistry and SPF only went up to 8. Ditto for American Gigolo with Richard Gere and Lauren Hutton: lonely politician’s wife/gigolo patron Michelle is, inexplicably, the only decent role Hutton ever got, and Michelle’s to-die-for Ralph Lauren wardrobe, alone of all clothes ever, actually warrants the adjective timeless.

Virginia Heffernan

Tootsie; Jerry Maguire; Boiler Room: I don't mindlessly flip very often, but somehow if I find one of these on, I believe it contains a topical message for me. I have to watch each one the end—again—to see what the message is. Message from Tootsie recently is a line of Michael Dorsey I missed the first 78 times I saw the movie. "It's depressing to be disagreed with." That's just TRUE.

Michael Idov

Groundhog Day always works. For obvious reasons, it's a movie most conducive to tuning in at any point.

Almost 20 years later, I am still enough of a sucker for The Fugitive to watch it every time it's on. In fact, I love coming across it about half an hour in, because the prologue is the weakest part.

Every time I find AMC showing Goodfellas, which is to say roughly once a week, I will drop everything and watch 15-20 minutes in yet another futile attempt to understand why it's considered a great film.

Julie Klausner

Fargo, The Birdcage, Men in Black, Jackie Brown, Legally Blonde, Working Girl and Little Shop of Horrors.

Dan Kois

As I am a dude, the answer is The Shawshank Redemption. Always. Every time. And then it gets so dusty in the TV room and my eyes water a lot, from the dust.

Also based on what is going on right now on HBOCOM, another answer is Say Anything.

Richard Lawson

It feels like the fourth Die Hard movie, Live Free or Die Hard, is on FX every other day, and I have probably now seen at least the Bruce Willis vs. Maggie Q. elevator shaft fight some twenty times. The line "Can I get another dead Asian hooker bitch" resounds.

I'll watch any of the great mid-'90s John Grisham trilogy—The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client (never The Chamber)—whenever they're on, but sadly they play them less and less the farther away they get.

Embarrassingly, almost any Julia Roberts movie merits a watch, whether it be Pretty Woman, Erin Brockovich, or Ocean's Eleven (not really a Julia Roberts movie, but y'know). Like The Pelican Brief (another Julia Roberts movie), they don't play Sleeping With the Enemy on TV near often enough anymore.

Will Leitch

Love and Death: IFC plays this every month or so, and there is not a single frame of this movie that does not make me laugh like a buffoon. Woody Allen getting his old-school Bob Hope on.

Bull Durham: I feel like they used to show this a lot more than they do now; I blame Tim Robbins being obnoxious about his political opinions, and also table tennis. The only movie, still, that gets baseball right.

Jon Methven

Jaws: My wife found out about my Jaws fetish before we were married, so it’s fair game. A lot of times we’ll be on our way to bed and she’ll come back to the living room and find me on the couch—“Sorry, Jaws is on, I’ll be an hour or so”—and like a heart surgeon’s wife, she understands.

Rudy: I’ve been flipping around, about ready to drop off, and clicked on Rudy—and thought, “Oh damn, here we go again.” This guy never quits getting beaten up and down the football field, the least I can do is sit here for another 90 minutes to support him. Just give up, Rudy, so I can go to bed.

Road House: I’m not sure why a movie about the world’s greatest bouncer always gets to me. If I ever were to become an accomplished bar fighter, I’d like to fashion my life after Dalton.

Sarah Miller

For some reason, I really like anything with Denzel Washington in it. I just find his movies consistently entertaining in that way you want a movie you probably shouldn't be watching to be.

My boyfriend, Rob Guerin, says, Pretty in Pink, "because it's dumb, and I've seen it."

Neither of us would ever pass up the chance to watch Bring it On—it's got a great color palette, a great fart joke, amazing dancing, the whole jazz hands thing, Ian Roberts as the evil choreographer may be the best character in a movie, ever.

Amy Monaghan

"C.K. Dexter Haven! Oh, Mister C.K. Dexter Haven!" I will always stop for drunk Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story. He and Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant are all at their most beautiful and young Dinah rivals Groucho himself singing "Lydia, the Tattooed Lady."

All About Eve: Thelma Ritter, George Sanders and the cattiest single-entendres ever! Yay! True story: a student once told me she hadn't ever seen a black-and-white movie before and that she was surprised by how... "bitchy they were?" I asked. "Yes!" Silly girl—she thought her sorority sisters had invented backstabbing!

A tie (Can I have a tie? Please don't ask me to choose.): Pee-wee's Big Adventure and The Blues Brothers. I know every goddamn word. Every single music cue. SPOILER ALERT: There's no basement in the Alamo. Also? Sometimes it's hard to be a woman.

Emily Nussbaum

Tootsie: Every scene in that movie is funny. Except for the one where Jessica Lange talks about the flowered wallpaper, which is sweet and touching.

Broadcast News: Because of Albert Brooks imitating Schwarzenegger on TV, and the rant he gives about the devil, and the sweating newscast, and the part Holly Hunter walks through her perfume in the polka-dot dress and says defensively, "I read it in a magazine!" and all the other parts. I'm also a sucker for Shattered Glass and any other movie in which journalists are sassy yet horribly fucked up.

Daytrippers: I've watched it about 25 times so I might as well watch it again.

Alex Pareene

I have a deep aversion to watching edited-for-broadcast versions of R-rated movies I like (so like no Goodfellas on TNT or whatever for me) but there are a ton of heavy-rotation TCM movies that I regularly end up watching most of. (Like Ball of Fire, which I swear is on monthly.)

Also, for real: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. (Especially happy if I have already missed the slooow beginning.)

Troy Patterson

Around the tenth or twelfth time I watched The Big Sleep, I learned to stop worrying that it makes no sense. I stopped watching the movie and now just let the movie happen to me. It works well as both an ambient comfort and as an object to zone out on. It is a noir white-noise machine—zen in the zing of the gunshots, velvet unfolding from Vivian's throat.

James Poniewozik

I was about to say I don't watch movies on TV (I usually don't), and then I remembered: Dazed and Confused. There was a stretch a while back when it was being rerun constantly on cable, and it's it's a movie I can easily pick up at any point. I have older siblings who were in high school in the '70s, so it somehow makes me nostalgic for a time I didn't actually experience. (Wet Hot American Summer = same deal, but don't think it ever got rerun as much.) Funny, sweet movie.

David Roth

Devil's Advocate: Fully insane, and always on. I'll never write my 3,500-word essay on the joys of Bad Pacino, but I don't really have to, thanks to this. He's all teeth and bellowing, everything else is as over-the-top as he is, and also apparently the Turner cable channels have some sort of deal requiring that this air every 48 hours, so my affection for it is refreshed constantly.

Super Troopers: I know, I know. The first time I saw this was years ago on HBO, fairly late at night. I wound up watching about 40 minutes standing up, waiting to turn the TV off as soon as I stopped being amused. Eventually I just sat down and watched it.

Exorcist III: Legion: This almost never happens, but it's like a holiday when it does. William Peter Blatty writing wild and wildly metaphysical dialogue for a bunch of veteran character actors; Brad Dourif rants and raves with a weirdly pitch-shifted voice; there's a dream sequence in DC's Union Station that features Samuel L. Jackson, Fabio and Patrick Ewing. There is no other movie like this in the world, which is both sad and perfectly okay.

Maureen Ryan

Not so long ago, a basic cable channel used to show an O.G. Star Wars marathon around Christmas. Nothing could be better than sitting around, sated with too many carbohydrates, watching light saber battles, and you could rest assured in the knowledge that the cable network wouldn't bastardize the movies as much as George Lucas did.

Any Terminator movie, any time, will command my full attention. If there's one principle that I've gleaned from watching hundreds of hours of science-fiction television and film, it's that robots fighting are always cool.

Rakesh Satyal

I have maintained since childhood that, at any given point in time, Mrs. Doubtfire and/or Steel Magnolias is on somewhere in the world. I am actually convinced that when TV stations have an extra 10-15 minutes of airtime, they simply play a scene from one of those two movies to plug the hole. It's like, "Oh, a boom fell on one of the Idol Top Twelve; cue Ouisa getting her mustache waxed."

Never turn Baby Mama off in my presence. It's one of the most underrated comedies ever. The scene in which Greg Kinnear surprises Amy Poehler by showing up at Tina Fey's apartment is only slightly less funny than if Greg Kinnear surprised Amy Poehler by showing up at Tina Fey's apartment in real life.

Bethlehem Shoals

From Hell: It's like a History Channel special with stars and a budget.

Anything with Matthew McConaughey: Too lumbering for sitcoms, too frequently oblivious for the big screen, but still our era's single greatest poet of male dumbness. Only on basic cable does it feel as if he's in on the joke.

Chinatown: I promise, I'm not trying to save face here. Chinatown is eternal because it can so easily be watched as trash.

Lizzie Skurnick

Kill Bill, Gladiator, Overboard and, apparently, Back to the Future II. THIS WEEK.

Todd VanDerWerff

Anything by Quentin Tarantino: I find the man's output often overrated, but damned if it doesn't make for perfect channel-surfing entertainment. There's something about the way his movies feel like chopped up and reassembled versions of other movies that lends itself to casual drop-ins, even when the movie's two-thirds over.

The Back To The Future trilogy: Perhaps the movies I watched more than any other at that pivotal age of 11. There's something about them that remains undeniable to me, even as I've realized the sequels practice a law of diminishing returns.

His Girl Friday: The plot is so secondary to the real attraction here—rapid-fire wit and two people gradually re-falling in love—that I'll gladly watch over and over and over again.

Sara Vilkomerson

I hesitate to say this first one, at the risk of sounding high-falutin, but whenever AMC shows either of The Godfathers 1 or 2, I have a very hard time walking away. My favorite moment is either the smoking the cigarette scene on the steps of the hospital with the baker ("I am Enzo!") or any time Sonny loses his shit.

Of course I am equally mesmerized by You've Got Mail, but I think that's because there's something so relaxing about it: pretty Upper West Side vistas, Meg Ryan's perfect, pleated, Marc Jacobs wardrobe, and sunny apartment, and the shout-out to the NY Observer is always amusing.

Meg Ryan again for pick three! I can't explain why I always stop for When a Man Loves a Woman, but I always do. I'm not even convinced it's an all-that-good movie, and yet, here we are. Thanks Oxygen.

Honorable mentions: An American President, Two Weeks Notice and The Cutting Edge.


Related: What's Your Most Played Song?



Nadia Chaudhury always stops to watch the Harry Potters, Never Been Kissed, and The Notebook (only for Gosling).

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142 comments

]]> It's been well documented that TV is a time-suck. One reason: the repeat showings of movies, some of which, even if you've already seen them a hundred times (and you might even own on DVD), you will stick with for the duration, through commercials, bad cable edits and all. (Speaking of cable edits, was I the only one who didn’t know about that pubic hair on the pizza scene in She’s All That?!?) We asked an assortment of folks which movies never fail to suck them in.

Kurt Andersen

Pretty much the only time I mindlessly flip TV channels these days is when I'm traveling alone and staying in a hotel, or my wife's out of town. I guess probably Badlands, because it's one of my favorite movies and the real-life story on which it's based (young couple on a murder spree in Nebraska, where I grew up) is my earliest memory, from when I was 3. And almost any Bill Murray movie.

Kate Aurthur

I realized that there are two things that stop me dead in my tracks when I notice they're on:

Jaws 2: I lived in East Hampton full-time until I was 10, so the Jaws phenomenon affected me profoundly. (I told adults I wanted to be an ichthyologist specializing in sharks.) I wasn't allowed to see the first one in the theater until its re-release the following summer—and I still don't know why my parents allowed that—but by the time Jaws 2 rolled around in 1978, I went immediately. I argued passionately to my parents that it was better than Jaws. They laughed in my face. Now I see that it is terrible, but man, I cannot stop watching it whenever it's on.

Jaws 3: I was nearing 14 in 1983 when Jaws 3 came out. And this I knew was horrific upon first viewing. The 3D is so, so bad. And yet, there are things I love about it, like the horrendous miscasting of Bess Armstrong as the grown-up Mike Brody's (Dennis Quaid) girlfriend. God, I love it! I wish it were on right now. It's awful.

Katie Baker

Legends of the Fall: I've bailed on plans with friends multiple times when I've caught a glimpse of Samuel and Susannah playing tennis on that grass court and known I was now in(side) for the long haul. The only time I don't stop is if I've gotten there AFTER Colonel Ludlow's legendary chalkboard-swinging "AARGGSSCRRWWWUUJMM" scene, because if you've missed that one then what's the point?

A League of Their Own: Someday I am going to produce a 10,000-word chapbook on why this is one of the (if not THE) greatest sports movies ever. And it's worth watching all the way ‘til the end because the old lady casting is so completely sublime. I'd actually love to see someone do a side-by-side of each actress in, say, 15 years with her League of Their Own flash-forward counterpart. I feel like Madonna may have actually appeared in both roles.

Armageddon: And it doesn't matter if I watch all 151 minutes or just the last ten, you can bet I will be choking back tears. (Also, I just went to IMDB to look up how many minutes the movie is—don't worry, I'm not THAT much of a freak—and saw that it's playing this [past] Saturday on FX. Setting my DVR now!)

Alex Balk

I always hope to hit Goodfellas closer to the end than the beginning, because I had plans for those next three hours, but regardless of where I come in I'm stuck for the duration. And every time I land on Silence of the Lambs, I tell myself that I'll turn it off after the "Goldberg Variations" scene where the face-eating happens, but I always get sucked in until the end.

Allison Benedikt

I have been known to stop and sob throughout Father of the Bride (the Steve Martin one, YEP), can easily get pulled into two out of the three Bourne movies, The Upside of Anger (when it used to be on a lot), Gattaca, Funny People (if I catch it in its first two-thirds, before Adam Sandler and Leslie Mann do it), and, lately, that great Ethan Hawke-Philip Seymour Hoffman dysfunctional family thriller Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. But these are the three I've probably watched the most in the past few years:

Groundhog Day: Because it's always good to be reminded that Bill Murray used to be actual funny, not Wes Anderson-funny, and actually moving, not Sofia Coppola-moving. And a great physical comedian. Also: weather humor, Andie MacDowell's only good role.

The Heartbreak Kid: The Farrelly Brothers one. Starring Ben Stiller. It is such a bad movie I can't defend myself but I have watched this thing maybe ten times? Sorry.

Role Models: A great David Wain comedy. Perfect Jane Lynch role. And an essential exhibit in the Case for Why Seann William Scott Should Be a Star. (see: The Dukes of Hazzard, Southland Tales) Pro tip: Whenever Ken Jeong is on screen, go scoop your ice cream.

Sarah Blackwood

Titanic, even if stretched to three or four hours on network television. The dresses! The cross-class romance! Billy Zane's wig! Billy Zane's maniacal exasperation ("I put the coat on her!")! Just… Billy Zane. On a more personal note, this movie came along at exactly the right time in my life, saving me from Godard and insufferability. Popcorn is delicious, it whispered, and I ate it right up.

Speaking of popcorn, you know that part in Dirty Dancing, when Johnny Castle sexily plucks his air guitar, and then shows off some ideas to Neil for a new last dance—a cross between Cuban rhythms and soul—only to be snootily instructed that the last dance will in fact be a pachanga (can you imagine? A pachanga?!), and then also how when you pause the television just so, when Johnny is getting out of bed with Baby, you can maybe, just maybe, see something you aren't supposed to see? Yeah. So maybe I've been watching this movie nonstop since I was twelve years old.

And finally: Go. I can't believe that I have already lived through an entire subculture that has since disappeared. I mean, I wasn't super rave-y, but I did wear a few pairs of ill-advised big jeans. Thank God I never got around to buying one of those teddy-bear backpacks. This movie rules, though, the film that launched a thousand Olyphanatics.

Maria Bustillos

Vincent Price's voice induces satori, so I will watch/listen to any movie in which he appears to the end, no matter when I came in.

Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle is the Ur-text of my personal ethics, a touchstone that repays close and frequent study. It teaches grace under pressure, tolerance, a philosophical submission to the cruel twists of fate and most of all, it shows us how to balance the demands of an independent mind with the responsibilities of brotherhood.

Any animation produced by the Fleischer brothers will also find me rooted to the spot for the duration.

Bobby Finger

Overboard: Kurt and Goldie have been together for nearly 30 years, and their real-life relationship is one of only two things that makes me believe true love is possible. The second thing is that Randy Newman song used during Overboard's end credits.

My Cousin Vinny: Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei) is one of my favorite movie characters, and denying myself the opportunity to hear her say, "I'm an out-of-work hairdresser" during that final courtroom scene is practically self-harm.

Emma Garman

My picks are basically identical: early eighties L.A. noirs involving murders, heroes getting framed for murders, cruelly thwarted love and bonkers suntans. Against All Odds, with Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward, makes me nostalgic for the distant days when romantic leads had chemistry and SPF only went up to 8. Ditto for American Gigolo with Richard Gere and Lauren Hutton: lonely politician’s wife/gigolo patron Michelle is, inexplicably, the only decent role Hutton ever got, and Michelle’s to-die-for Ralph Lauren wardrobe, alone of all clothes ever, actually warrants the adjective timeless.

Virginia Heffernan

Tootsie; Jerry Maguire; Boiler Room: I don't mindlessly flip very often, but somehow if I find one of these on, I believe it contains a topical message for me. I have to watch each one the end—again—to see what the message is. Message from Tootsie recently is a line of Michael Dorsey I missed the first 78 times I saw the movie. "It's depressing to be disagreed with." That's just TRUE.

Michael Idov

Groundhog Day always works. For obvious reasons, it's a movie most conducive to tuning in at any point.

Almost 20 years later, I am still enough of a sucker for The Fugitive to watch it every time it's on. In fact, I love coming across it about half an hour in, because the prologue is the weakest part.

Every time I find AMC showing Goodfellas, which is to say roughly once a week, I will drop everything and watch 15-20 minutes in yet another futile attempt to understand why it's considered a great film.

Julie Klausner

Fargo, The Birdcage, Men in Black, Jackie Brown, Legally Blonde, Working Girl and Little Shop of Horrors.

Dan Kois

As I am a dude, the answer is The Shawshank Redemption. Always. Every time. And then it gets so dusty in the TV room and my eyes water a lot, from the dust.

Also based on what is going on right now on HBOCOM, another answer is Say Anything.

Richard Lawson

It feels like the fourth Die Hard movie, Live Free or Die Hard, is on FX every other day, and I have probably now seen at least the Bruce Willis vs. Maggie Q. elevator shaft fight some twenty times. The line "Can I get another dead Asian hooker bitch" resounds.

I'll watch any of the great mid-'90s John Grisham trilogy—The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client (never The Chamber)—whenever they're on, but sadly they play them less and less the farther away they get.

Embarrassingly, almost any Julia Roberts movie merits a watch, whether it be Pretty Woman, Erin Brockovich, or Ocean's Eleven (not really a Julia Roberts movie, but y'know). Like The Pelican Brief (another Julia Roberts movie), they don't play Sleeping With the Enemy on TV near often enough anymore.

Will Leitch

Love and Death: IFC plays this every month or so, and there is not a single frame of this movie that does not make me laugh like a buffoon. Woody Allen getting his old-school Bob Hope on.

Bull Durham: I feel like they used to show this a lot more than they do now; I blame Tim Robbins being obnoxious about his political opinions, and also table tennis. The only movie, still, that gets baseball right.

Jon Methven

Jaws: My wife found out about my Jaws fetish before we were married, so it’s fair game. A lot of times we’ll be on our way to bed and she’ll come back to the living room and find me on the couch—“Sorry, Jaws is on, I’ll be an hour or so”—and like a heart surgeon’s wife, she understands.

Rudy: I’ve been flipping around, about ready to drop off, and clicked on Rudy—and thought, “Oh damn, here we go again.” This guy never quits getting beaten up and down the football field, the least I can do is sit here for another 90 minutes to support him. Just give up, Rudy, so I can go to bed.

Road House: I’m not sure why a movie about the world’s greatest bouncer always gets to me. If I ever were to become an accomplished bar fighter, I’d like to fashion my life after Dalton.

Sarah Miller

For some reason, I really like anything with Denzel Washington in it. I just find his movies consistently entertaining in that way you want a movie you probably shouldn't be watching to be.

My boyfriend, Rob Guerin, says, Pretty in Pink, "because it's dumb, and I've seen it."

Neither of us would ever pass up the chance to watch Bring it On—it's got a great color palette, a great fart joke, amazing dancing, the whole jazz hands thing, Ian Roberts as the evil choreographer may be the best character in a movie, ever.

Amy Monaghan

"C.K. Dexter Haven! Oh, Mister C.K. Dexter Haven!" I will always stop for drunk Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story. He and Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant are all at their most beautiful and young Dinah rivals Groucho himself singing "Lydia, the Tattooed Lady."

All About Eve: Thelma Ritter, George Sanders and the cattiest single-entendres ever! Yay! True story: a student once told me she hadn't ever seen a black-and-white movie before and that she was surprised by how... "bitchy they were?" I asked. "Yes!" Silly girl—she thought her sorority sisters had invented backstabbing!

A tie (Can I have a tie? Please don't ask me to choose.): Pee-wee's Big Adventure and The Blues Brothers. I know every goddamn word. Every single music cue. SPOILER ALERT: There's no basement in the Alamo. Also? Sometimes it's hard to be a woman.

Emily Nussbaum

Tootsie: Every scene in that movie is funny. Except for the one where Jessica Lange talks about the flowered wallpaper, which is sweet and touching.

Broadcast News: Because of Albert Brooks imitating Schwarzenegger on TV, and the rant he gives about the devil, and the sweating newscast, and the part Holly Hunter walks through her perfume in the polka-dot dress and says defensively, "I read it in a magazine!" and all the other parts. I'm also a sucker for Shattered Glass and any other movie in which journalists are sassy yet horribly fucked up.

Daytrippers: I've watched it about 25 times so I might as well watch it again.

Alex Pareene

I have a deep aversion to watching edited-for-broadcast versions of R-rated movies I like (so like no Goodfellas on TNT or whatever for me) but there are a ton of heavy-rotation TCM movies that I regularly end up watching most of. (Like Ball of Fire, which I swear is on monthly.)

Also, for real: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. (Especially happy if I have already missed the slooow beginning.)

Troy Patterson

Around the tenth or twelfth time I watched The Big Sleep, I learned to stop worrying that it makes no sense. I stopped watching the movie and now just let the movie happen to me. It works well as both an ambient comfort and as an object to zone out on. It is a noir white-noise machine—zen in the zing of the gunshots, velvet unfolding from Vivian's throat.

James Poniewozik

I was about to say I don't watch movies on TV (I usually don't), and then I remembered: Dazed and Confused. There was a stretch a while back when it was being rerun constantly on cable, and it's it's a movie I can easily pick up at any point. I have older siblings who were in high school in the '70s, so it somehow makes me nostalgic for a time I didn't actually experience. (Wet Hot American Summer = same deal, but don't think it ever got rerun as much.) Funny, sweet movie.

David Roth

Devil's Advocate: Fully insane, and always on. I'll never write my 3,500-word essay on the joys of Bad Pacino, but I don't really have to, thanks to this. He's all teeth and bellowing, everything else is as over-the-top as he is, and also apparently the Turner cable channels have some sort of deal requiring that this air every 48 hours, so my affection for it is refreshed constantly.

Super Troopers: I know, I know. The first time I saw this was years ago on HBO, fairly late at night. I wound up watching about 40 minutes standing up, waiting to turn the TV off as soon as I stopped being amused. Eventually I just sat down and watched it.

Exorcist III: Legion: This almost never happens, but it's like a holiday when it does. William Peter Blatty writing wild and wildly metaphysical dialogue for a bunch of veteran character actors; Brad Dourif rants and raves with a weirdly pitch-shifted voice; there's a dream sequence in DC's Union Station that features Samuel L. Jackson, Fabio and Patrick Ewing. There is no other movie like this in the world, which is both sad and perfectly okay.

Maureen Ryan

Not so long ago, a basic cable channel used to show an O.G. Star Wars marathon around Christmas. Nothing could be better than sitting around, sated with too many carbohydrates, watching light saber battles, and you could rest assured in the knowledge that the cable network wouldn't bastardize the movies as much as George Lucas did.

Any Terminator movie, any time, will command my full attention. If there's one principle that I've gleaned from watching hundreds of hours of science-fiction television and film, it's that robots fighting are always cool.

Rakesh Satyal

I have maintained since childhood that, at any given point in time, Mrs. Doubtfire and/or Steel Magnolias is on somewhere in the world. I am actually convinced that when TV stations have an extra 10-15 minutes of airtime, they simply play a scene from one of those two movies to plug the hole. It's like, "Oh, a boom fell on one of the Idol Top Twelve; cue Ouisa getting her mustache waxed."

Never turn Baby Mama off in my presence. It's one of the most underrated comedies ever. The scene in which Greg Kinnear surprises Amy Poehler by showing up at Tina Fey's apartment is only slightly less funny than if Greg Kinnear surprised Amy Poehler by showing up at Tina Fey's apartment in real life.

Bethlehem Shoals

From Hell: It's like a History Channel special with stars and a budget.

Anything with Matthew McConaughey: Too lumbering for sitcoms, too frequently oblivious for the big screen, but still our era's single greatest poet of male dumbness. Only on basic cable does it feel as if he's in on the joke.

Chinatown: I promise, I'm not trying to save face here. Chinatown is eternal because it can so easily be watched as trash.

Lizzie Skurnick

Kill Bill, Gladiator, Overboard and, apparently, Back to the Future II. THIS WEEK.

Todd VanDerWerff

Anything by Quentin Tarantino: I find the man's output often overrated, but damned if it doesn't make for perfect channel-surfing entertainment. There's something about the way his movies feel like chopped up and reassembled versions of other movies that lends itself to casual drop-ins, even when the movie's two-thirds over.

The Back To The Future trilogy: Perhaps the movies I watched more than any other at that pivotal age of 11. There's something about them that remains undeniable to me, even as I've realized the sequels practice a law of diminishing returns.

His Girl Friday: The plot is so secondary to the real attraction here—rapid-fire wit and two people gradually re-falling in love—that I'll gladly watch over and over and over again.

Sara Vilkomerson

I hesitate to say this first one, at the risk of sounding high-falutin, but whenever AMC shows either of The Godfathers 1 or 2, I have a very hard time walking away. My favorite moment is either the smoking the cigarette scene on the steps of the hospital with the baker ("I am Enzo!") or any time Sonny loses his shit.

Of course I am equally mesmerized by You've Got Mail, but I think that's because there's something so relaxing about it: pretty Upper West Side vistas, Meg Ryan's perfect, pleated, Marc Jacobs wardrobe, and sunny apartment, and the shout-out to the NY Observer is always amusing.

Meg Ryan again for pick three! I can't explain why I always stop for When a Man Loves a Woman, but I always do. I'm not even convinced it's an all-that-good movie, and yet, here we are. Thanks Oxygen.

Honorable mentions: An American President, Two Weeks Notice and The Cutting Edge.


Related: What's Your Most Played Song?



Nadia Chaudhury always stops to watch the Harry Potters, Never Been Kissed, and The Notebook (only for Gosling).

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/02/most-watched-movies/feed 142 Ferris Bueller Revisited http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/ferris-bueller-revisited http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/ferris-bueller-revisited#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:40:22 +0000 Alex Balk http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/ferris-bueller-revisited "A friend once told me that he thought — knew, actually — that Alan Ruck's character Cameron was obviously fucking Ferris' girlfriend behind his back. Next time you see the move, pay close attention to Cameron and Sloane. You'll never unsee it."

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]]> "A friend once told me that he thought — knew, actually — that Alan Ruck's character Cameron was obviously fucking Ferris' girlfriend behind his back. Next time you see the move, pay close attention to Cameron and Sloane. You'll never unsee it."

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/ferris-bueller-revisited/feed 7 Three Interesting Things About These Meh Oscar Nominations http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-oscar-nominations http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-oscar-nominations#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:00:50 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-oscar-nominations • This is actually Nick Nolte's third Oscar nomination! (For Warrior.) He was most recently snubbed for his work in Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore.

• While, as usual, women don't direct any films, because they can't, due to being women, and therefore they don't get nominated, two women actually at least somehow got nominated for Best Screenplay! That's Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig, who co-wrote Bridesmaids, which should totally win its category. And! A woman actually got nominated in the Adapted Screenplay entry! Co-nominated at least; husband-and-wife team Peter Straughan & Bridget O’Connor wrote Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy which should completely and utterly win, because that is a great script. Unfortunately she died in late 2010.

• I bet Spain's really glad they nominated Black Bread, instead of Almodovar's The Skin I Live In. It is, however, the first movie in Catalan to be put forward! It is also the first movie in Catalan to be snubbed in favor of some other countries' films at the Oscar nominations. "Grim but gripping" said Variety! "Stodgy, starchy and not particularly nutritious" said the Hollywood Reporter! "Totally didn't see it," said everyone in America.

What else am I missing? (And no, our boyfriend Michael Fassbender wasn't snubbed, Shame just wasn't a very good movie. Oh also! Drive got nominated for sound editing! Which, YES, OBVIOUSLY!)

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]]> • This is actually Nick Nolte's third Oscar nomination! (For Warrior.) He was most recently snubbed for his work in Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore.

• While, as usual, women don't direct any films, because they can't, due to being women, and therefore they don't get nominated, two women actually at least somehow got nominated for Best Screenplay! That's Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig, who co-wrote Bridesmaids, which should totally win its category. And! A woman actually got nominated in the Adapted Screenplay entry! Co-nominated at least; husband-and-wife team Peter Straughan & Bridget O’Connor wrote Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy which should completely and utterly win, because that is a great script. Unfortunately she died in late 2010.

• I bet Spain's really glad they nominated Black Bread, instead of Almodovar's The Skin I Live In. It is, however, the first movie in Catalan to be put forward! It is also the first movie in Catalan to be snubbed in favor of some other countries' films at the Oscar nominations. "Grim but gripping" said Variety! "Stodgy, starchy and not particularly nutritious" said the Hollywood Reporter! "Totally didn't see it," said everyone in America.

What else am I missing? (And no, our boyfriend Michael Fassbender wasn't snubbed, Shame just wasn't a very good movie. Oh also! Drive got nominated for sound editing! Which, YES, OBVIOUSLY!)

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-oscar-nominations/feed 47 And the Worst Movie of 2011 Is.... http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/and-the-worst-movie-of-2011-is http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/and-the-worst-movie-of-2011-is#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:50:05 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/and-the-worst-movie-of-2011-is You know it was a bad year in movies when Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close only clocks in at #5 on the top ten worst movies. Why, it's the annual Vulture Critics' Poll! (Warning: you can probably guess what's chosen as the absolute worst movie of 2011. HINT: Worse than Transformers!) All the ballots are here, and when you read them, you wonder how the terrible, awful, boring War Horse didn't make it into the top ten. One awesome thing about the ballots: the New York Times' Nathan Lee only put down one movie: Midnight in Paris. Now that's awesome. (Still: super-mad at Alynda Wheat for putting Bad Teacher on her list. That movie was extremely amusing and incredibly gross!)

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]]> You know it was a bad year in movies when Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close only clocks in at #5 on the top ten worst movies. Why, it's the annual Vulture Critics' Poll! (Warning: you can probably guess what's chosen as the absolute worst movie of 2011. HINT: Worse than Transformers!) All the ballots are here, and when you read them, you wonder how the terrible, awful, boring War Horse didn't make it into the top ten. One awesome thing about the ballots: the New York Times' Nathan Lee only put down one movie: Midnight in Paris. Now that's awesome. (Still: super-mad at Alynda Wheat for putting Bad Teacher on her list. That movie was extremely amusing and incredibly gross!)

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/and-the-worst-movie-of-2011-is/feed 17 "I Hate J. Hoberman" http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/i-hate-j-hoberman http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/i-hate-j-hoberman#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:41:57 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/i-hate-j-hoberman Here is a hate letter to film critic J. Hoberman on the occasion of his firing from the Village Voice this week. I have zero thoughts on the matter, and many people are very upset about the canning... although I will note that his top ten list of 2011 is... unusual. (J. Edgar is somehow on it! "Mildred Pierce" is tied for tenth! Everyone's least favorite Cronenberg movie of the last 19 years comes in at #1!)

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]]> Here is a hate letter to film critic J. Hoberman on the occasion of his firing from the Village Voice this week. I have zero thoughts on the matter, and many people are very upset about the canning... although I will note that his top ten list of 2011 is... unusual. (J. Edgar is somehow on it! "Mildred Pierce" is tied for tenth! Everyone's least favorite Cronenberg movie of the last 19 years comes in at #1!)

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/i-hate-j-hoberman/feed 14 "Extremely Loud": "Like 'Jason Takes Manhattan' But With More Bloodshed" http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/extremely-loud-like-jason-takes-manhattan-but-with-more-bloodshed http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/extremely-loud-like-jason-takes-manhattan-but-with-more-bloodshed#comments Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:30:08 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/extremely-loud-like-jason-takes-manhattan-but-with-more-bloodshed A moment of holiday joy for you: The A/V Club gives "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" a straight-up "F"—in three short paragraphs. The comments are also enjoyable.

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]]> A moment of holiday joy for you: The A/V Club gives "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" a straight-up "F"—in three short paragraphs. The comments are also enjoyable.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/extremely-loud-like-jason-takes-manhattan-but-with-more-bloodshed/feed 2 The 15 Most Delightful Internet Films of 2011 http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/the-15-most-delightful-internet-films-of-2011 http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/the-15-most-delightful-internet-films-of-2011#comments Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:00:28 +0000 Eric Spiegelman http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/the-15-most-delightful-internet-films-of-2011
Of all the videos uploaded to the Internet this year, here are fifteen that found their way into my feeds and dashboards and inboxes and my bookmarked aggregators of varying stripe, fifteen that inspired me to to copy and paste their URL into a Google Doc labeled “2011 Videos Wonderful,” a title comprised of words I was likely to search for when later I couldn’t find my ongoing list, and fifteen that survived when I took that giant collection and whittled it down to ten, and then added five that were somehow similar to others in the top ten and deserved inclusion because they hinted at some kind of trend. Arduous? Perhaps. But so very, very worth it.

• These choices are in no particular order, with the exception of the one video above. "Game Deaths" by Rob Beschizza is the best Internet film of the year. The video strings together the death sequences from a score of old 8-bit video games, cut with scenes from an Atari ad of a previous era, an ad where people seem to delight in their own simulated doom. Meanwhile, a MIDI version of “Mad World” by Tears For Fears plays in the background; the lyric “the dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had" never even needs to be sung. Look how hilariously twisted we are, this video says. We’ve taken our darkest, most self-destructive impulses, hardwired into the human brain long, long ago, and we figured out how to make them fun.

• Two of the most wonderful Internet shorts this year divided the screen into two sections in two different but compelling ways. The first one is "Symmetry," by the brilliant team at Everynone (in collaboration with WNYC’s Radiolab). This film is like "Sesame Street" for grownups. Each cut presents two images and gives you exactly enough time to reflect on the connection between them before moving on to the next pair. You should watch this video in the morning whenever the crossword puzzle is too hard. It’s a great warm-up exercise.

• Next is "Splitscreen: A Love Story," by James W. Griffiths. The use of splitscreen here is integral to the story, providing a narrative that is ultimately made explicit by the final scene. Fun fact: this was shot entirely on a Nokia smartphone, and it won this year’s Nokia Shorts competition. Damn you, quality branded content!

• "How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds" is a video that changed my life. Directed by Alex Lisowski for Saveur, it solves a problem I wrestled with for years. I’ve peeled them by hand, done the whole crush them with a cutting board thing, and I even had a fancy tool from Sur La Table that didn’t quite get it right. Then Todd Coleman showed up in my browser and it was a garlic revelation.

• The best of hipster art reminds you of that awkward age where you were old enough to think about sex but nowhere near old enough to actually do it. Those were the days you had a crush on your babysitter, you got really, really wrong information from your friends, and your fantasies about classmates had plot lines from Disney films. It’s a specific kind of innocence, a curiosity about sex before you knew how sex could just ruin everything. The kid in Destroyer’s music video for Kaputt—that’s me at age eleven, imagining girls in one-piece bathing suits because bikinis were too intimidating, and also I have a runny nose so thank you for the kleenex.

• If “childlike hipster music videos with sexual undertones” is a category (and it probably is on Netflix) then the runner up to this year’s champion would be the video for Ice Cream by Battles. The lyrics are incomprehensible, the images are a random assortment of karate, desserts, and naked flesh, yet everything coheres through the magic of multiple exposure photography –a technique that may be trendy, but one that I never get sick of (and so long as Instagram doesn’t figure out how to do it everything will be okay). One last thing: the drummer for Battles looks exactly like Shooter McGavin.

• Ronen Verbit was clear with the clerk at the Apple store that he would return the three iPhones for a refund in a couple days. They were for an art project, he said. The clerk was fine with this and rang up the purchase. Ronen told me this origin story in the lobby of the Tribeca Grand, but before he finished he jumped over a table to talk to a pretty girl he’d never seen before who was on her way out of the hotel. He never came back. Anyway, "Trapped in an iPhone" is one of my favorites of the year, and I’d say it establishes Verbit as the Buster Keaton of the Internet, though I actually think his table hurdling does more to advance that reputation.

• “A large sandstorm hit the Sahara Desert, making it nearly impossible to see the sky with my own eyes,” wrote Terje Sørgjerd about his epic time-lapse film, "The Mountain." “I was sure my whole scene was ruined. To my surprise, my camera managed to capture the sandstorm, backlit by Grand Canary Island. If you ever wondered how the Milky Way would look through a Sahara sandstorm, look at 00:32.” This video is the best argument for owning an Apple TV and figuring out how to use AirPlay. Watching it fullscreen doesn’t cut it. Watch it on a 46-inch plasma.

• The companion piece is "Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over," edited by Michael König, shot from the International Space Station. König’s video is the science to Sørgjerd’s art, König looks down from the heavens while Sørgjerd looks up at them, and both capture things you’ve never seen before—that literally no human has ever seen before. These two may have reached the limits of what time lapse photography has to offer, so I expect to be unimpressed with everything in this category next year.

• Some artists can look at the overwhelming collection of blah YouTube videos and see an infinite resource of found footage. The master of this is Kutiman, known IRL as Ophir Kutiel, a 29-year-old musician from Israel. Kutiel started a project called ThruYOU in 2009, where he downloaded dozens of solo, amateur musical performances and mixed them into a single, seamless symphony. "My Favorite Color" is this year’s mix, comprised of 23 individual videos from people who just wanted to play something for their home camcorder, but ended up members of a extremely talented band.

• Another YouTube artiste is user Ignoramusky. His medium of choice is the cute cat video, and "Kitten vs. a Scary Thing" is a subtle and complex masterpiece. See, "Kitten vs. a Scary Thing" is a two cent video with a million dollar soundtrack. The artist painfully edited and synced the score to the action, with a level of respect normally reserved for a high-budget Hollywood blockbuster. In doing so, he elevates the entire genre of cute. "Kitten vs. a Scary Thing" is the gourmet grilled cheese of the Internet.

• Videos that make this list are generally ones I’ve gone back and watched over and over again. This usually doesn’t happen with comedy—once the surprise is gone I tend not to laugh as hard. But occasionally there’s an exception, and this year there were two. The first was "Dave Seger’s M83 Vocal Audition." This video cracks me up every time I watch it. Seger’s timing is impeccable, and his deadpan earnestness sets the joke up perfectly. It’s a performance that follows worthily in the footsteps of Andy Kaufman lip syncing the Mighty Mouse theme on "Saturday Night Live."

• The second one is Scott Gairdner’s "Hall of Inaccurate Presidents." I’m a sucker for funny name humor (Awl posts like these are some of my favorites), and this video turns me into a snickering idiot. Sweeny Patch, people! Sweeny Patch!

• The final ad hoc category this year is accidental marine encounters with nature at its most sublime from the vantage point of something that requires oars. Both videos in this category have a lot to do with tools, as well: this variety of film documents something we're unlikely to see, but for the wonderful and portable gadgetry we can have with us at all times. Although it’s unedited and largely the result of some pretty poor choices, the guy on a kayak who stuck a GoPro camera to his head and paddled into the blue whale migration lanes off the coast of Los Angeles captured something fairly incredible. The two moments it got me to hold my breath nudged it onto this list.

• On the other side of the world, Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith canoed out onto the River Shannon in Ireland and stumbled upon a hundred thousand starlings flying in two giant clouds. Even in a tiny, low resolution box on your computer screen, "Murmuration" will clear your mind in the way only a state of awe can, the way that few things seem to do anymore. What they did with the footage is impeccable. The look on that one girl’s face at the end, yeah. That’s it.

Say what you want about the vainglorious pursuit of Internet spectacle, if our insatiable desire to capture only the most awesome of awesome leads to more videos like these, I think we’ll all be the better for it. Here’s to the never-ending pursuit of the new, to chasing the dragon of that childlike wonder we so rarely have as we age, and to finding it wherever we can, even if only online.

Last Year: The 10 Most Wonderful Internet Films of 2010



Eric Spiegelman is a web producer in Los Angeles.

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Of all the videos uploaded to the Internet this year, here are fifteen that found their way into my feeds and dashboards and inboxes and my bookmarked aggregators of varying stripe, fifteen that inspired me to to copy and paste their URL into a Google Doc labeled “2011 Videos Wonderful,” a title comprised of words I was likely to search for when later I couldn’t find my ongoing list, and fifteen that survived when I took that giant collection and whittled it down to ten, and then added five that were somehow similar to others in the top ten and deserved inclusion because they hinted at some kind of trend. Arduous? Perhaps. But so very, very worth it.

• These choices are in no particular order, with the exception of the one video above. "Game Deaths" by Rob Beschizza is the best Internet film of the year. The video strings together the death sequences from a score of old 8-bit video games, cut with scenes from an Atari ad of a previous era, an ad where people seem to delight in their own simulated doom. Meanwhile, a MIDI version of “Mad World” by Tears For Fears plays in the background; the lyric “the dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had" never even needs to be sung. Look how hilariously twisted we are, this video says. We’ve taken our darkest, most self-destructive impulses, hardwired into the human brain long, long ago, and we figured out how to make them fun.

• Two of the most wonderful Internet shorts this year divided the screen into two sections in two different but compelling ways. The first one is "Symmetry," by the brilliant team at Everynone (in collaboration with WNYC’s Radiolab). This film is like "Sesame Street" for grownups. Each cut presents two images and gives you exactly enough time to reflect on the connection between them before moving on to the next pair. You should watch this video in the morning whenever the crossword puzzle is too hard. It’s a great warm-up exercise.

• Next is "Splitscreen: A Love Story," by James W. Griffiths. The use of splitscreen here is integral to the story, providing a narrative that is ultimately made explicit by the final scene. Fun fact: this was shot entirely on a Nokia smartphone, and it won this year’s Nokia Shorts competition. Damn you, quality branded content!

• "How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds" is a video that changed my life. Directed by Alex Lisowski for Saveur, it solves a problem I wrestled with for years. I’ve peeled them by hand, done the whole crush them with a cutting board thing, and I even had a fancy tool from Sur La Table that didn’t quite get it right. Then Todd Coleman showed up in my browser and it was a garlic revelation.

• The best of hipster art reminds you of that awkward age where you were old enough to think about sex but nowhere near old enough to actually do it. Those were the days you had a crush on your babysitter, you got really, really wrong information from your friends, and your fantasies about classmates had plot lines from Disney films. It’s a specific kind of innocence, a curiosity about sex before you knew how sex could just ruin everything. The kid in Destroyer’s music video for Kaputt—that’s me at age eleven, imagining girls in one-piece bathing suits because bikinis were too intimidating, and also I have a runny nose so thank you for the kleenex.

• If “childlike hipster music videos with sexual undertones” is a category (and it probably is on Netflix) then the runner up to this year’s champion would be the video for Ice Cream by Battles. The lyrics are incomprehensible, the images are a random assortment of karate, desserts, and naked flesh, yet everything coheres through the magic of multiple exposure photography –a technique that may be trendy, but one that I never get sick of (and so long as Instagram doesn’t figure out how to do it everything will be okay). One last thing: the drummer for Battles looks exactly like Shooter McGavin.

• Ronen Verbit was clear with the clerk at the Apple store that he would return the three iPhones for a refund in a couple days. They were for an art project, he said. The clerk was fine with this and rang up the purchase. Ronen told me this origin story in the lobby of the Tribeca Grand, but before he finished he jumped over a table to talk to a pretty girl he’d never seen before who was on her way out of the hotel. He never came back. Anyway, "Trapped in an iPhone" is one of my favorites of the year, and I’d say it establishes Verbit as the Buster Keaton of the Internet, though I actually think his table hurdling does more to advance that reputation.

• “A large sandstorm hit the Sahara Desert, making it nearly impossible to see the sky with my own eyes,” wrote Terje Sørgjerd about his epic time-lapse film, "The Mountain." “I was sure my whole scene was ruined. To my surprise, my camera managed to capture the sandstorm, backlit by Grand Canary Island. If you ever wondered how the Milky Way would look through a Sahara sandstorm, look at 00:32.” This video is the best argument for owning an Apple TV and figuring out how to use AirPlay. Watching it fullscreen doesn’t cut it. Watch it on a 46-inch plasma.

• The companion piece is "Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over," edited by Michael König, shot from the International Space Station. König’s video is the science to Sørgjerd’s art, König looks down from the heavens while Sørgjerd looks up at them, and both capture things you’ve never seen before—that literally no human has ever seen before. These two may have reached the limits of what time lapse photography has to offer, so I expect to be unimpressed with everything in this category next year.

• Some artists can look at the overwhelming collection of blah YouTube videos and see an infinite resource of found footage. The master of this is Kutiman, known IRL as Ophir Kutiel, a 29-year-old musician from Israel. Kutiel started a project called ThruYOU in 2009, where he downloaded dozens of solo, amateur musical performances and mixed them into a single, seamless symphony. "My Favorite Color" is this year’s mix, comprised of 23 individual videos from people who just wanted to play something for their home camcorder, but ended up members of a extremely talented band.

• Another YouTube artiste is user Ignoramusky. His medium of choice is the cute cat video, and "Kitten vs. a Scary Thing" is a subtle and complex masterpiece. See, "Kitten vs. a Scary Thing" is a two cent video with a million dollar soundtrack. The artist painfully edited and synced the score to the action, with a level of respect normally reserved for a high-budget Hollywood blockbuster. In doing so, he elevates the entire genre of cute. "Kitten vs. a Scary Thing" is the gourmet grilled cheese of the Internet.

• Videos that make this list are generally ones I’ve gone back and watched over and over again. This usually doesn’t happen with comedy—once the surprise is gone I tend not to laugh as hard. But occasionally there’s an exception, and this year there were two. The first was "Dave Seger’s M83 Vocal Audition." This video cracks me up every time I watch it. Seger’s timing is impeccable, and his deadpan earnestness sets the joke up perfectly. It’s a performance that follows worthily in the footsteps of Andy Kaufman lip syncing the Mighty Mouse theme on "Saturday Night Live."

• The second one is Scott Gairdner’s "Hall of Inaccurate Presidents." I’m a sucker for funny name humor (Awl posts like these are some of my favorites), and this video turns me into a snickering idiot. Sweeny Patch, people! Sweeny Patch!

• The final ad hoc category this year is accidental marine encounters with nature at its most sublime from the vantage point of something that requires oars. Both videos in this category have a lot to do with tools, as well: this variety of film documents something we're unlikely to see, but for the wonderful and portable gadgetry we can have with us at all times. Although it’s unedited and largely the result of some pretty poor choices, the guy on a kayak who stuck a GoPro camera to his head and paddled into the blue whale migration lanes off the coast of Los Angeles captured something fairly incredible. The two moments it got me to hold my breath nudged it onto this list.

• On the other side of the world, Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith canoed out onto the River Shannon in Ireland and stumbled upon a hundred thousand starlings flying in two giant clouds. Even in a tiny, low resolution box on your computer screen, "Murmuration" will clear your mind in the way only a state of awe can, the way that few things seem to do anymore. What they did with the footage is impeccable. The look on that one girl’s face at the end, yeah. That’s it.

Say what you want about the vainglorious pursuit of Internet spectacle, if our insatiable desire to capture only the most awesome of awesome leads to more videos like these, I think we’ll all be the better for it. Here’s to the never-ending pursuit of the new, to chasing the dragon of that childlike wonder we so rarely have as we age, and to finding it wherever we can, even if only online.

Last Year: The 10 Most Wonderful Internet Films of 2010



Eric Spiegelman is a web producer in Los Angeles.

---

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/the-15-most-delightful-internet-films-of-2011/feed 10 "Mission Impossible": I Don't Understand How Tall Everyone Is http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/mission-impossible-i-dont-understand-how-tall-everyone-is http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/mission-impossible-i-dont-understand-how-tall-everyone-is#comments Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:10:50 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/mission-impossible-i-dont-understand-how-tall-everyone-is

Paula Patton is 5'4" (allegedly).

Jeremy Renner is allegedly 5'10" but last time I lit his cigarette I had to bend down. (That's what... she said?)

Tom Cruise is tall enough to kick this dude in the collarbone, though not without pants-strain.

Jeremy Renner is taller than Paula Patton.

Pretty much.

Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg are the same height as Paula Patton in, presumably, heels.

Paula Patton is taller than Simon Pegg in very tall heels.

Jeremy Renner is taller than Simon Pegg. (The Internet also says Simon Pegg is 5'10" but no one believes that. (Pegg seen here with Samuli Edelmann, who is no taller than 5'10".))

Tom Cruise and Jeremy Renner are the same height.

Ving Rhames is six feet tall.

Simon Pegg is taller than Tom Cruise.

Or is he.

Tom Cruise is taller than Simon Pegg.

Katie Holmes is taller than everyone.

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]]>

Paula Patton is 5'4" (allegedly).

Jeremy Renner is allegedly 5'10" but last time I lit his cigarette I had to bend down. (That's what... she said?)

Tom Cruise is tall enough to kick this dude in the collarbone, though not without pants-strain.

Jeremy Renner is taller than Paula Patton.

Pretty much.

Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg are the same height as Paula Patton in, presumably, heels.

Paula Patton is taller than Simon Pegg in very tall heels.

Jeremy Renner is taller than Simon Pegg. (The Internet also says Simon Pegg is 5'10" but no one believes that. (Pegg seen here with Samuli Edelmann, who is no taller than 5'10".))

Tom Cruise and Jeremy Renner are the same height.

Ving Rhames is six feet tall.

Simon Pegg is taller than Tom Cruise.

Or is he.

Tom Cruise is taller than Simon Pegg.

Katie Holmes is taller than everyone.

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See more posts by Choire Sicha

37 comments

]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/mission-impossible-i-dont-understand-how-tall-everyone-is/feed 37